'The Pain Body' and was commissioned by someone who suffers from Fibromyalgia. Fibromyalgia's a little known auto immune disorder that's hereditary, whereby the person inflicted w/ it has intense pain throughout their body at any given time - pain like menstrual cramps, itching, clawing, throbbing, etc. - with no particular trigger. Astonishingly, most of these people seem completely normal to you or me, to the point where you would never suspect the person with the disorder was ill. The normal reaction of the un-informed - me included - is that the person is a serious hypochondriac. However, nothing could be further from the truth. Many of these people live w/ what's like a throbbing toothache throughout their bodies, a toothache without end. Can you imagine? Anyway, there's medications, and there's good and bad phases. Morgan Freeman suffers from this.

Anyway, a friend who lives with this daily wanted to make an expression of this and sort of project it out of her system, and announce it as a thing to be acknowledged and understood. Once, in a marital spat, she took a sharpie and scribbled all over her naked body where she was in really bad pain and showed her husband. Expressive. We recreated the sharpie incident as an entry point to the painting. This painting is a portrait of that pain body (thank you eckart tolle for the name, et al), and then I was allowed carte blanche to do whatever I wanted with the rest of it.

An amazing part of this experience for me was that since I was 3 years old I always wanted to be an artist. Artists are so trained through osmosis in this culture to do things for themselves - their voice, their career, their style, etc. - with little concern for others. This painting felt for me that for whatever reason I have these skills it felt great to use them for someone else's benefit, to help them in some sense by getting the pain out of them (metaphorically speaking) onto something else, at least so they can examine it with some kind of distance.